A new industry consortium called the Open Eye MSA Group has formed to look at new techniques to enable lower cost, power-efficient, and latency-optimized optical transceivers for 50G, 100G, 200G, and 400G data center applications. The group’s long-term goal is to increase the adoption of PAM4-based optical transceivers by using lower cost, mature (at lower speeds) analog techniques for clock and data recovery (CDR). Cost and power dissipation are two of the most important considerations for data center operators evaluating datacom transceivers. Using analog CDR minimizes the need for digital signal processing and should reduce cost and power consumption. Another benefit to using analog CDR is a significant reduction in latency, which is important in many time-sensitive applications. MSA founding members Semtech and MACOM contend that transceivers incorporating CDR in place of the current PAM4 DSP will have lower cost and power dissipation because PAM4 DSPs are the most expensive and power-hungry item on the bill of materials. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

The number of TV households with pay TV access and free access to UHD linear channels marked a turning point in 2018. In IHS Markit’s latest survey of UHD channel carriage, in 8 of the 28 countries where pay TV operators provided linear UHD channels as part of a package, 25% or more of total TV households had access to linear UHD. Portugal was the country with the highest penetration of linear UHD availability, 82% of all TV households had the potential to receive a linear UHD broadcast as part of their pay TV package.

According to the latest numbers from app intelligence company Priori Data, Fortnite has seen its biggest iOS revenue surge since October 2018, generating upwards of $2.8m daily on the release of its latest season and more than quadrupling its daily pre-season net revenue overnight.

Huawei has been added to the Entity List by the US Department of Commerce. Companies or persons on the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Entity List are required to obtain a license before they can buy or transfer American technology.

IHS Markit has just published first quarter 2019 (Q1 2019) digital cinema data for the Cinema Operators Strategic Intelligence Service. These are the highlights from the exhibitors tracked in the Service for that quarter.

Netflix has acquired a second original series from Chinese streaming platform Youku. I Hear You, produced and owned jointly by Alibaba-owned Youku and Chinese film studio Sugarent Film & TV, will be made available by Netflix to subscribers in all 190 markets today (15 May).
In China, the 24-episode romantic comedy was premiered simultaneously on streaming platforms Youku and Mango TV on 28 January 2019. Netflix acquired Day and Night in 2017.

OnePlus has always been associated with technology fandom, gorilla marketing and appealing to a limited subset of addressable smartphone consumers who tend to track younger and more tech savvy.
With the OnePlus 7 Pro, OnePlus is moving up the pricing ranks and is expanding beyond one new device in its portfolio.

On 6th May 2019 Axiata and Telenor - made official statements regarding ongoing merger discussion. The announcement, is clear that the merger plan is still in discussion phase, and there are no certainties that this will lead to a transaction agreement. However, the suspension of Axiata and Digi stock trading indicates that a detail of an offer are pending, with a number of details such as first pass at a valuation of the split agreed.

5G brings with it the promise of a range of new services from the faster speeds of enhanced mobile broadband to mass deployment of machine-type communications to ultra-reliable low-latency applications. With this range of services comes a pressing need to design network infrastructure that can easily and efficiently support a range of service types. In IP/MPLS networks, deterministic, SLA-based services were traditionally supported by implementing traffic engineering using protocols such as RSVP-TE. This approach, however, was complex and difficult to scale and as a result saw only limited deployment in service provider networks. Segment Routing (SR) was conceived as an approach to solve these problems and provide a foundation for support of SLA services, reliability, and performance in core router networks. Its ability to run over any data plane and to leverage cloud-based path computation has made it a natural complement to the introduction of SDN. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

For the past six years, I have never missed PERSPECTIVES, Ribbon Communications’ exclusive customer and partner event that brings marquee speakers like FCC CTO Eric Burger this year and Sir Ken Robinson four years ago. Every year is different, and this one was no exception. From the JW Marriott in LA Live last year, we moved to the JW Marriott DC on Pennsylvania Avenue for three full days (April 29 through May 1) of thought leadership content and top-notch entertainment, including a private event at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

I’m back from my annual pilgrimage to the Brooklyn 5G Summit, held 23–25 April 2019, and this sixth summit had impressive, realistic thoughts about what 6G could look like. In my 11 May 2018 Analyst Insight Welcome to the Brooklyn 6G Summit!, I thought the organizers (Nokia and NYU Wireless) would rename it the Brooklyn 6G Summit, but they did not—maybe next year. Of course, we also talked about 5G, particularly how things are unraveling in South Korea and the US, and as usual we got more comprehensive insights from the Koreans than the Americans with the exception of John Saw, who offered a fantastic lecture on massive MIMO, illustrated by the extensive work Sprint has been doing in the field. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

Industry giant Epic Games has announced that it’s in the process of acquiring San Diego-based studio Psyonix, who develops the very popular vehicular-soccer game Rocket League. The title is one of the biggest cross-platform games, second only to Epic’s Fortnite, and with more than 57 million lifetime players it represents the company’s most significant acquisition to date.

Google today announced a pair of new smartphones aimed at generating a broader market appeal than their previous three generations of premium Pixels. The Pixel 3a and 3a XL are priced starting at $399 and $479 respectively and represents a new approach to filling out Google’s smartphone lineup with approximately a $300 discount on list price of existing models. The design language of the new Pixels remains the same as the current Pixel 3 devices introduced last year, which had been Google’s first internally designed smartphone product (as opposed to previous use of HTC or LG designs as defined by FCC filings). In order to hit the lower price points, Google has pared down the core electronics, opting to use the 700 and 600 tiers of Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs.